lundi 8 juillet 2013

Shipment en route for Kuma

The new shipment of additional equipment which should have left Brussels for Kuma at the end of April was finally wrapped up and delivered to the transporter last Sunday. Additional computers, keyboards, mice, screens, printers, projectors, projections screen, white boards and a good quantity of small equipment are now en route for Kuma, via Lomé, and expected to reach destination just before August 15. The shipment even contains a vacuum cleaner which should facilitate equipment maintenance, making the fight against dust more efficient.

The Raspberry Pi workshop

Some of the equipment will be used for the setup of a first Raspberry Pi workshop. The 25 Raspberry Pi’s arrived, with all cables and power supplies, last week.
We now need to build a stable image of the system (Raspbian “wheezy”), copy it on the 25 SD cards and test the entire set of Raspis… We’ll start with a very simple image, with no specific purpose except for the general introduction to the raspberry Pi and Linux. Of course, scratch and Python will be pre-installed and they will make it possible to introduce programming.
Python will certainly be the language of choice for the introduction to programming at the CIK. However, a test installation of Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) for the Raspi seems to indicates it can work in an acceptable way, despite being rather slow… An introduction to programming applications for the web (HTML, PHP, SQL, and CSS) should therefore also be possible for the students of the lycée (HS) using the Raspi.

We are, of course, eager to receive any feedback from others who have some experience introducing the Raspberry Pi in a school environment and to listen to all advice related to our objective of using the Raspi with Middle School and High School students...